A NEW CRUSADER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 302, 21 December 1937, Page 16

A NEW CRUSADER.

HUEY LONG'S r LATE AIDE. AN ANTI-PRESIDENT MOVE. (By H. M. BAUKHAGE.) WASHINGTON. The day after election day last year the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith was, according to his own statement, in durance vile. The day before election day this year he was consorting with the great (outside the New Deal), and had enough money to make a down payment, according to his own statement, on a 96.000 dollar radio hook-up. Self-appointed head of the "committee of a million," the ardent avengelistCrusader is getting ready to go after the President, the New Deal, John Lewis et al hammer and tongs with the zeal he learned when he was a lieutenant of the late Huey Long. Mr. Smith may or may not build tip a following as important—or unimportant —politically as Father Coughlin's (whose network he is taking over), but he has a long-time programme ahead. He believes the Anti-saloon League was the greatest pressure group ever organised in American politics, but he says it made one mistake. They had a •bad name. They put in "anti-saloon" and then put the saloon out of business. And that put them out. Mr. Smith makes no such mistake. He is anti-nothing on paper. He is just a "committee of a million" fighting against "concentrating authority in the hands of the President," a "tendency to establish an industrial dictatorship"— he is by no means limiting the worlds he has to conquer.

How much impression his announced plans have made, if any, on the New Deal scene so far, it is hard to say. He might become an important factor. —N.A.N.A.